“My brother,” Caroline clarified. “He invited Lord Ashby to call on me Tuesday, Lord Pemberton on Thursday, and some cousin of Lord Pemberton’s whose name I couldn’t retain because he said nothing of interest for an entire hour and a half, on Friday.”
“An hour and a half.” Laura winced. “What did he talk about?”
“His horses. His estate in Hertfordshire. His horses again.” Caroline took a long sip of ale and found it bitter, flat, and completely wonderful. “He also mentioned that he hoped I enjoyed quiet evenings at home, at which point I smiled and thought about running directly into the Thames.”
Laura chuckled. “None of them were to your taste at all?”
“They were perfectly decent men.” Caroline watched the wiry fighter circle his opponent, patient, waiting. “That’s the problem. They’re all perfectly decent, perfectly dull, perfectly prepared to marry a woman who will smile at their dinner parties, produce their heirs, and not ask a single inconvenient question for the rest of her natural life.” She felt the familiar tightness return to her chest and pushed it back. “My brother means well… I know he does. He only wants me settled and safe.”
“But…” Laura urged her to continue.
Of course, her best friend would hear the hesitation underneath her voice.
“But I’ve spent three years being molded into someone I’m not, and now I’m supposed to choose my prison and be grateful for the bars.” The words came out quieter than she intended; she cleared her throat swiftly. “Hence the list.”
Laura’s expression shifted, emotions between exasperation and affection. “The list,” she repeated, as though reminding herself of her own complicity.
It had begun, as most things between them did, over too many biscuits and a poorly supervised afternoon in her brother’s library. They had been talking, as they often did, about all the things that appeared in books but never in their actual lives, and at some point, Caroline had picked up a pen and begun writing them down.
Six items. The kind of items that would have sent Lady Hayward directly to her fainting couch.
She had shown the list to Laura, who had read it twice, then asked: “When do we start?”
That was especially why Caroline loved her.
A roar went up from the crowd as the stockier fighter caught the wiry one across the cheekbone.
“Whoa,” Laura blurted, “that looks quite painful.”
The blow spun him sideways, the crowd erupting in a chorus of groans and triumphant oaths, but he recovered fast, shaking it off with a roll of his neck.
“Perhaps not that painful for him,” Caroline whispered to her friend.
The fighter came back with a combination of punches that had the men around Caroline surging to their feet and shouting. She leapt with them, hat nearly flying from her head, and had to remind herself not to shriek.
It wasextraordinary. Not the violence of it; she had no particular love of that, but the energy, the wildness, and the nakedness of it all.
This was no performance, no artifice. It was just two men and whatever they were made of, stripped to the bare fact of it.
This, she thought.This is what society has kept from me and other women.
Eventually, the match ended with the wiry fighter down on one knee, his second hauling him upright, and the crowd howling its opinion on the outcome.
Caroline clapped with the rest of them, genuinely delighted.
But then she became aware of Laura’s hand on her arm.
“People are staring,” Laura muttered.
Caroline glanced along the bench. Two men at the end had turned their heads, their expressions not hostile, but watchful.
Drat.
She had been too loud, a little too enthusiastic, and she was certain that she was all too readable. That meant trouble.
“Right,” she said. “Out we go.”
They rose together, and in the shuffling press of men shifting and rising around them, Laura stepped sideways to avoid a man’s elbow?—